181
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E 
P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N :
F r o m  a  c o n v e r s a t i o n  w i t h 
J e a n - F r a n ç o i s  L y o t a r d 1
W o l f g a n g  S c h i r m a c h e r *
Note: I first met the most important postmodern philosopher in 
1991, when he accepted my invitation to hold a lecture at the New 
School for Social Research in New York. That both of us work primar-
ily in phenomenology, and that Nietzsche and Heidegger strongly in-
fluenced our work, certainly contributed to a rapid deepening of our 
relationship. But more importantly, Lyotard was an extraordinarily ge-
nial and generous soul. Despite his immense workload of teaching du-
ties all over the world and his numerous publications, he took the time 
for a conversation with a younger philosopher. What is more, his feel-
ings of friendship motivated him to active support of my plans for an 
interdisciplinary doctoral program, one that conceives of media and 
communications in a philosophical and thus novel way. Lyotard was a 
member of the first American Council of the European Graduate School 
and was supposed to teach in Saas-Fee as well. His untimely death pre-
vented this, but his thinking continues to inspire us (see http://www.egs.
edu/jeanfrancoislyotard.html). The following excerpts, which appear for 
the first time in the Festschrift in honor of the phenomenologist Paolo 
Knill, another friend, are taken from a conversation held on April 22, 
1992 at Yale University, where Lyotard spent a semester as the Henry 
Luce Scholar at the Whitney Humanities Center. The discussion took 
place in English, a foreign language for both of us, and Lyotard never got 
the opportunity to edit the transcript. Video and tape recordings were 
made, and Lyotard expressly authorized me to change the wording to 
ensure that our philosophical points would prevail over any inadequa-
cies in the language we used in the discussion. It goes without saying 
that under these circumstances, I assume responsibility for the entire 
182
P O L I G R A F I
text. My paper “Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology” 
(1985) was the first of several publications that presented interim reports 
on my work that built upon Ereignis Technik: Heidegger and the Ques-
tion of Technology (1980) and Technik und Gelassenheit (1983). After 20 
years, the book Homo Generator: Ethics for an Artificial Life will appear 
in 2002, perhaps still too early.
Schirmacher: My phenomenological demonstration that the human 
being is first and foremost Homo generator can be all too easily mis-
understood. Even the explanatory subtitle “Ethics for an Artificial Life” 
runs the danger of being drawn into the ideologically charged contro-
versy around the natural and the artificial. The last thing I am trying 
to do is replace with virtual worlds the unfolding nature of the human 
and the environment! And the question of what ethics means demands 
immediate, if provisional, clarification; otherwise one would run astray 
in the search for some moral imperative, a “should,” for value systems 
or for natural law. Let us begin with artificiality. To this notion, whose 
usage today is limited to the sense of the fabrication and imitation, I 
give back its most important connotation: the proximity to art and 
autopoiesis. Artificiality is not a normed framework, not Heidegger’s 
Gestell, but points to the autopoietic praxis of art as its fundamental 
trait and includes within its scope surprise and fulfillment. Artificiality 
in this “founded” sense (Husserl) is charged with determining the con-
stitution of the human life-world, whose nature has always been and is 
completely engendered by us. As Homo generator we generate worlds 
with materials whose “what” is given but whose “how” we must invent. 
In the pre-technological age this generating of worlds was ascribed to 
the gods; at the climax of global mechanization, to the shamans of sci-
ence; and it is only now, in the encroaching post-technological epoch, 
that the immense world-engendering powers of Homo generator be-
come evident. This creation is by no means purely cerebral; neither is it 
limited to the realm of perception, but concerns the whole person and 
embraces embodiment and communal action as well. An artificial life 
is led as the art of life, by a person who exists authentically, whose ethic 
is anthropologically characterized by openness. Since the founding of 
the modern age by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, this prospect has 
inspired daring projects in the most diverse minds. I mention here only 
183
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille, Heidegger, Sar-
tre, Arendt, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, and Deleuze.
My ethics for an artificial life lays the trace (Derrida) of a non-meta-
physical existence, for Homo generator becomes capable of a life af-
ter post-modernity within the scope of the post-technological world, 
which is separated from the technological age by an abyss encountered 
by Kierkegaard’s leap. Nevertheless, it is not the object of such theses to 
rehabilitate the obsolete notion of a universal philosophy. Rather, they 
have survived the postmodern criticism, which has made any reliance 
on authorities impossible and has destroyed the idea of a unified world-
view. Yet the indisputedly systematic extrication from the postmodern 
condition takes place via a postmodern decision, which—like my basic 
phenomenology of the post-technological world—does not propose a 
new being, a new history nor even a completely different world view. 
Rather, the situation can be viewed thus: the leap is imperceptible, the 
post-technological horizon goes unnoticed, and the ethical fulfillment 
behind our backs is barely noticeable. The seismographically recorded 
derangement is minimal, a turning-away from the mundane normality 
of the postmodern world toward an equally self-evident affirmation of 
artificial life. From the standpoint of cultural criticism, this affirmation 
obviously invites suspicion. But its beginnings can be observed in the 
first generation that grows up within the scope of the post-technologi-
cal horizon and does not even notice, for it knows nothing else. When 
all technologies are simply available without having been asked for, the 
time of self-enjoying hedonists (Deleuze) and “media monads” (Schir-
macher) has arrived. With the irresistible spread of western technologies, 
the leap to artificial life has become unavoidable for non-western cul-
tures as well, even if the speed and the intensity of this process may vary 
greatly. That anthropologically, we are the “artificial beings by nature” 
(Helmuth Plessner), unabashedly “eccentric” and anthropomorphic at 
once, precludes our development in the image of a cybernetic machine. 
While information technology and genetic technology are two of the 
most striking means to the active development of humanity and to the 
ethical realization of the art of life, the cyborg myth (Donna Haraway) 
must not be narrated metaphysically. For it is by no means a matter of 
bringing together the human and the machine, of engendering a hu-
184
P O L I G R A F I
man-machine symbiosis, because the technologies themselves are always 
already our existential, autopoeitically authored acts, in which each ex-
istence itself is at stake. Robots as “mind children” (Hans Moravec) are 
unambiguously anthropomorphic, and therefore such questions that try 
to pass themselves off as ontological are in fact meaningless: “Is a cyborg 
a human or a machine?” “Does artificial intelligence represent the next 
stage of evolution?”
Lyotard: It is certainly possible to describe the human being as an 
artifact, for everything in the world is manufactured and therefore arti-
ficial. One could even view each living cell as a technical system in this 
sense: it is an open and complex system, always capable of generating 
energy and converting it into activity. Such a description, in the manner 
of system theory, is given preference in the natural and social sciences, 
and this is by no means accidental. From the smallest systems all the way 
up to the galaxies, one has a hypothesis at hand that enables one to un-
derstand everything, including the human being. Instrumental ration-
ality and causal thinking are elegantly avoided in the process, for these 
systems are not means to some purpose and therefore not instrumental 
(but rather possess instrumentaria of their own). The human system has 
produced computers and related information systems in order to satisfy 
a need—for informational knowledge—that previously lurked in the 
dark, thereby improving the quality of its own—human—activity. This 
novel knowledge then engenders a new kind of energy and transforms 
it energetically. When we, justifiably, view things in this way, then the 
whole world, including the human world, is artificial. Our idea of the 
cosmos, too, is necessarily implicated, for we cannot know what the 
cosmos-in-itself is. The concept of artificiality provides us with a good 
understanding of so-called reality as well as a practical, successful way 
of dealing with it.
Schirmacher: But would this interpretation of artificiality not deny 
its origin, which I find in the self-conception and in the capriciousness 
of the human being? [Bekäme nicht die Energie das Subjekt der Ent-
wicklung …] Would not energy become the subject of development, 
and would we not become sub specie aeternatatis a mere subsystem? 
What must be clarified above all is the extent to which any system the-
ory is dependent upon the notion of given laws and conditions, whereas 
185
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
my idea of artificiality emphasizes the art of a fulfilling life, which must 
always generate its own context. Can Homo generator be a system?
Lyotard: In my view, neither the universal system nor the marginal 
system is subject to laws or determined by rules, and all the less so when 
we begin to consider complex systems. Extreme flexibility and funda-
mental indeterminacy characterize these systems, to which, as we are 
now beginning to understand, our brain belongs. Physical systems of all 
orders of magnitude obviously belong to this group of complex systems. 
Physicists maintain this curious differentiation between determined and 
undetermined loci, in the latter of which chance prevails. The human 
being is extraordinarily complex, the most complex life system we know, 
and this is so for the very reason that we possess the capacity for lan-
guage, and in language have a symbolic system at our disposal. That 
in the realm of language we find ourselves at a locus of indeterminacy, 
explains sufficiently why and how we experience our existence as open, 
why we must always first determine things, why we need our imagina-
tion, but also how our sense of responsibility came about. At the same 
time, it can be shown that the notion of systems having white spaces 
and abysses, loci that are not already determined, is by no means one 
that leads us astray.
Schirmacher: An open anthropology along those lines is what I have 
in mind, such as has been developed in Germany by Plessner, Ador-
no, and Ulrich Sonnemann and in France by Bataille, Lacan, Foucault, 
Deleuze, and Kristeva. But given your description, how could the charge 
of objectivism be refuted?
Lyotard: Every notion of objectivity or reality [… itself …] [sic] when 
the question of reality has to be posed each time anew by scientists. Is 
this chair real? What would “the reality of the chair” mean in micro-
physics? Not even our senses can answer this question any longer in the 
virtual world. The results of our perceptual activity are objects we form 
in an artificial manner with the help of our filters. Space and time, too, 
are formed in such a way as to make them useful—a human being, a 
cell, a butterfly, each mode of being manufactures its own reality (for 
the non-human world we naturally only assume this).
Schirmacher: In the natural sciences and to a certain extent in the so-
cial sciences as well there seems to be at least a reality substitute: what is 
186
P O L I G R A F I
real is what I can calculate. This quantitative model of the world, which 
the use of computers has made dominant in society, is nevertheless in-
strumental, not artificial. In artificial life, only what my life [causes to 
be fulfilled; gelingen läßt] can count as real. A functioning information 
technology may well be a part of this, one that does not subject me to 
surveillance and coercion, but which supports my openness and pre-
pares the adventure of everyday life. Yet it seems to me that all informa-
tion which presupposes that something can be defined and depicted in 
numbers is capable only in extremely rare cases, if at all, of accounting 
for essential characteristics of a life. Essential action and thought aims 
at the ambiguous, the dark, the open, the exalted, and can never be cap-
tured by a halftone screen [raster].
Lyotard: Doesn’t this mean that you are clinging to the anthropologi-
cal notion of an existence of one’s own? You turn against a relativistic 
arbitrariness and likewise criticize the idea of an objective existence. On 
the one hand you think in a postmodern way, on the other hand your 
objections to my system-description could be an indication that you 
take up an existential position between subjectivism and objectivism 
which is close to that of the early Heidegger and Sartre as well.
Schirmacher: Not consciously at any rate! My fundamental phenom-
enology of the human being in the post-technological world has from 
its very starting point extricated itself from the dualisms of subjectivity 
vs. objectivity, and centrism vs. decentrism: whoever directs his gaze at 
the human being, and accepts oneself as evidence, finds no native trace 
of such dualisms whatsoever. Authentic human living is anthropomor-
phic living—one who so lives knows of no other world beyond the hu-
man horizon and can experience no phenomenon in any way other than 
in relation to himself. But the human being in his mortality in no way 
sees himself as the determining center, for fallibility, weakness, and un-
certainty are fundamental human characteristics. Nor is human natal-
ity any indicator of fecund subjectivity, seeing as each birth is attended 
by innumerable other phenomena that we “generate”—i.e. reap, urge 
onward, and liberate—in the sense of an ethics of fulfillment. Homo 
generator follows an “economy of extravagance” (Bataille), in which the 
self satisfies [complies with] the silence of language as well as the over-
exuberance of activity that laughs in the face of death. From Heidegger’s 
187
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
projected model of “Being and Time,” what remains in the post-tech-
nological world is Sartre’s existential model, but this model, too, has 
changed radically. What once, as the “series of our deeds” was supposed 
to determine the essence of the human, neither possesses the inner con-
sistency that would render it capable of generating a series nor can it be 
limited to our deeds: a “reflexive apathy” (Jacques Poulain) denies itself 
to a consensus community devoted to whatever cause. To exist anthro-
pomorphically is for Homo generator nothing for which it must fight: 
in the face of the alienated versions of the anthropomorphic, from the 
gods to the notion of scientific objectivity, he remains calm [gelassen]. 
There is no bogeyman [scapegoat, Feindbild], nothing against which an 
ego itself would have to be constituted, but communication is in and 
of itself [von sich her] the platonic dialogue of the soul with itself, and 
the human being develops as a finite event [Ereignis] in the sense of the 
late Heidegger.
Lyotard: Thank you for this detailed representation, which allows me 
to pose a further question in reference to your concept of Homo genera-
tor: what do you mean by “generate?” One could very easily understand 
this process in the sense of system theory, and then Homo generator 
would succumb to the criticism to which you subjected the concept of 
system. Homo generator would be an abstraction, a species among oth-
er living species, and no one would be able to know or see this Homo.
Schirmacher: Homo generator is an open [determination, Bestim-
mung], a concept only now beginning to unfold, that might well be 
interrupted, to begin anew, and then perhaps double back. There exists 
no Homo yet, but rather he is a self-fulfilling prophecy. He generates 
himself in his most important technologies, once simply in breathing, 
sleeping, gathering food, procreating, fighting; today in solar technology 
as well, in genetic technology [biotechnology], and in the media. There 
exists for us the force, the power, and the opportunity to generate—that 
alone is what is referred to by the concept “Homo generator.”
Lyotard: But perhaps the will to power, as in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, 
is too strong as well?
Schirmacher: Nietzsche had the mentality of an artist, who creates 
his own aesthetic Olympus, and his will to power refers back to its en-
genderer, and is will to will, as Heidegger correctly saw it. Nevertheless, 
188
P O L I G R A F I
I do not share Nietzsche’s optimism, for perhaps only a pessimist has the 
right to be optimistic, if you will allow this remark from the president 
of the International Schopenhauer Society. Even if Nietzsche, as hardly 
another philosopher did, precisely analyzed cultural nihilism as the ideo-
logical end of metaphysics, as a cultural critic he remains anthropocen-
tric. How does he know all that, and does he not overestimate the scope 
of his insights? My Homo generator is a single, unmistakable person, 
not a species. I myself exist not being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s sense, 
but am being-for-the-world (Deleuze).
Lyotard: Very well, if you withdraw to the position of being a per-
son, there are theoretically no problems: it is ethically accepted that 
the concept of person necessarily implies freedom, and responsibility as 
well, whose objects one can choose for oneself. But are you not afraid of 
making things too easy for yourself? Isn’t “person” a concept that every 
ethics presupposes?
Schirmacher: It’s not as simple as all that, for in the traditional un-
derstanding the freedom of the person is always limited, if perhaps only 
voluntarily, as in Nietzsche’s aristocratic ethics. There is a difference be-
tween “freedom from” and “freedom to”, and every society absolutely 
wants to regulate the latter (Isaiah Berlin). But even if one were to follow 
de Sade, and see oneself as being allowed, even morally compelled, to 
do what one is able to do, one would still remain unfree in the sense of 
Homo generator. Does my life achieve fulfillment? This is the only ethi-
cal question. Freedom is a secondary concern, for I must first find out 
how my life is to achieve fulfillment; i.e. is in the strict sense ethical. This 
is the most difficult task for Homo generator, for the war technology 
of metaphysics and all institutions established by it, from the family to 
the courts of law, intentionally confuse the ethical sense, which for this 
reason only small children exhibit in a completely unselfconscious way. 
The non-negotiable claims to justice, fulfillment, and proportion in a 
personal ethic of fulfillment are feared as asocial just as persistence, pru-
dence, composure [tranquility, Gelassenheit] and generosity are lauded 
as modes of the worlds of ethics. Simply perceiving whether my life is 
achieving fulfillment, and avoiding error in this judgment [not deceiv-
ing myself in the process], is the hard work that you mentioned in the 
postmodern context of justice. It is easy for anyone to maintain that he 
189
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
has lived his life, but such a language game does not do justice to itself: 
for we cannot deny that we are for but a few moments certain of having 
truly and fully lived.
Lyotard: Very well, but what does it actually mean to live one’s own 
life? Would this refer to something beyond? Something that is more 
than mere existence, more than a being-here-and-nowhere-else? Is some-
thing realized with this life?
Schirmacher: No, there is no transcendent measure, only a self-ex-
amination, which of course we always already carry out in the form of 
a self-evaluation. In puberty and later as a midlife crisis, this exhibits 
itself in an often spectacular manner. But this evaluation remains far 
too limited to personal circumstances, social and professional success, 
or one’s own health and is therefore unduly personalized. My total life, 
24 hours a day, in its [with-ness?, Mitsein], in my environment, must 
be evaluated without any preconceived opinions: one can no more ex-
clude the computer I work at than the dreams and wishes that no one 
knows but me. The decisive difference from tradition, however, is that 
this evaluation can never be undertaken from without, and no one can 
ever tell another whether he has lived or not. The condescension of ethi-
cal theories that believe they can judge my fulfillment or lack thereof 
because I myself am supposedly incapable of doing so is nothing but 
the relic of a defunct paternalism. Homo generator generates his own 
self-confidence too!
Lyotard: But then do there exist immanent criteria for a life that 
achieves fulfillment, when one rejects as you do the judgment of others? 
Could health be an example of such a criterion? But then how would 
things stand with Antonin Artaud, who lived on the brink of insanity, 
ruined his health, and in the end couldn’t even sleep?
Schirmacher: When the balance between body and mind, as Spino-
za conceived it, is disturbed, it becomes difficult to speak of a fulfilled 
life, of course. “Health is not everything, but without it everything is 
nothing,” Schopenhauer emphasizes, and that society profits vampire-
like from the failure of certain individuals, should likewise inspire in us 
a healthy distrust of romanticized suffering. Vincent van Gogh created 
great art and thereby contributed a bit to the fulfillment of other lives, 
but he destroyed himself in the process. But only van Gogh himself can 
190
P O L I G R A F I
pass such judgment (and perhaps he did just that between his states of 
intoxication)!
Lyotard: We have the ability to perceive in occurrences the event 
[Ereignis] (Heidegger) that affects us and at the same time expresses 
[pronounces] us. And we are receptive indeed, since in the strange first 
years of our lives we were called upon […] without at the same time 
being in a position to be able to control events. This means in an exact 
sense to remember our childhood, and this process is likely the source 
of that to which you refer as generating. Someone like van Gogh is not 
trying merely to express something of course, but is bearing witness for 
the dark thing that he himself is. But can one say this of the computer, 
which will always be something that was never born?
Schirmacher: Beware of a misleading ontologization! What is correct 
is solely that the computer does not belong to the class of human beings 
created through birth, but is a cerebral creation [Kopfgeburt] that grows 
up cybernetically. What we have here are not two modes of existence, 
but only our existence—in another form. On the other hand, I would 
like to emphasize here your reference to early childhood, Lacan’s pre-
mirror phase [Vor-Spiegelstadium], for this formative experience prior 
to any word-language evidently insures that no conscious criticism can 
interrupt the flow of generating. As ashamed as we are of living in an 
intuitively childlike manner, no education of conformist enlightenment 
is able to keep us from trusting our own feelings more than theories. 
What I call responsible answers to no authority but is feedback from 
the ego itself, and the words are used only to mislead. Therefore, the 
ethics for an artificial life in its very beginnings breaks with the discur-
sive world. It shows no consideration to the language community with 
its language regulations, but acquires a feeling for what actions mean 
in the context of the event [Ereignis]. Intuitive knowledge, character-
ized by Spinoza as the authentic human knowledge, is in small children 
as overwhelming as it is taken for granted. Thus, we have all at one 
time been artificial beings, each for himself and without any intention, 
at once powerless [unconscious/ohnmächtig] and creative, the gods of 
our own worlds, world-designing [world-creating] monads. Since the 
mirror phase [Spiegelstadium] it has been drummed into our heads 
that this I-myself identity is merely an ideal ego, an early-childhood 
191
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
omnipotence fantasy, which does not accord with the given reality. As 
true as this may have been, it has never quite convinced us, as the last-
ing success of advertising demonstrates, and in the post-technological 
world, reality is yesterday’s news and it need not concern us any longer. 
Whatever the nature of the world’s given circumstances may have been, 
that have forced us into the struggle for survival and thus into denying 
our own ego [the ego itself ], Homo generator will refuse to accept any 
of the former constants. As the artificial ones of nature we will become 
like the true children (Goethe) and will produce worlds without being 
purpose-oriented or wanting to reign over them.
Lyotard: That sounds good. But aren’t you being a bit too naively 
trustful as regards feelings? Aren’t feelings the very things that are hard to 
grasp, and are we not in general incapable of understanding them? The 
so-called feelings are surely powerful, but they can also adversely affect 
the so-called person. We ought to be able to answer for our feelings, but 
in truth we don’t know what they mean. We continue to learn through-
out our lives, but often enough we die without figuring out what feel-
ings mean. Therefore I doubt whether this opacity of feelings can form 
a good basis for responsibility; the opposite seems to be true: feelings are 
things that withdraw, hide, disappear. Neither am I very trustful of that 
to which Lacan refers as “the thing,” something that is here and that is 
witnessed by us, but of whose meaning and just how it has become the 
source of generating we haven’t a clue.
Schirmacher: Could it be perhaps that the difficulty lies in your nev-
er having changed your traditional viewpoint? You are still trying to 
understand the other instead of paying attention to the ego itself, as it 
transpires [ereignet] in feelings. Not how I feel about someone or some-
thing is what I should pay attention to, but what this feeling contributes 
ethically, i.e. toward the fulfillment of my life.
Lyotard: So how is it with your feelings? As event [Ereignis]? Some-
thing or someone awakens a feeling within you, and that kindles in you 
the expression or the transference of your own feeling, over which you 
have no control?
Schirmacher: I don’t want to control the feeling, more like set it free. 
The best feelings simply happen and if they were instrumentalized they 
would just go to ruin.
192
P O L I G R A F I
Lyotard: Very well, but the alternative to a good feeling is not neces-
sarily instrumentalization. The question is, for example, what is the best 
way to deal with a small child, and what is a good way to be spoken to 
by one about feelings?
Schirmacher: Because he cannot resist the child, the adult learns so 
much that is new. For Levinas this was the core of an asymmetrical eth-
ics: the other gives you an order you cannot resist.
Lyotard: But at the same time Levinas had a very strong sense for 
the law as well.
Schirmacher: I know, but that’s something I lack completely.
Lyotard: The law is not only respectful with regard to the others, it 
must also be taken over from oneself in a particular way. This way can-
not be reduced to general tolerance; the law regards as very dangerous a 
world where everything is allowed. That is why it is our duty to forbid 
the child something, for sometimes this is necessary in its own interest. 
A curious situation results: on the one hand the necessity of having no 
law, to be blind to law, for we of course do not possess this law nor are 
we capable of formulating it. But on the other hand we can have the 
feeling that there is a law there and that to instrumentalize someone, 
a child for example, violates the law. By this I want to say that we are 
inconsistent, and that it is therefore impossible to bring about a bal-
ance and to have a complete, fulfilled, and happy life. It seems more to 
be the case that we are compiled or generated by something that is in a 
certain sense intolerable. Even van Gogh was not very happy, even if he 
was capable of generating a reality for his work. He spent his life in ter-
rible fear, and yet he seems to me to present a good example that Homo 
generator—and generating itself—is a work of unavoidable suffering.
My second comment has to do with how it takes us human beings 
two to three years before we are capable of communicating in the tra-
ditional way. That doesn’t mean that during this period we are mere 
objects, rather that we are spoken to and influenced by a multitude 
of words, conversations, acts of tenderness, feelings, movements, and 
gestures. Things and contraptions influence us as well, good machines 
included, long before we can respond to them appropriately, with the 
aid of language.
Schirmacher: But this will not essentially change in the future either!
193
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
Lyotard: That’s correct, things will continue this way in life. But 
we know nothing at all of the consequences this will have. It shows 
once again how completely contradictory our feelings and our ways of 
thinking can be. Therefore it seems to me that the child is not some-
thing that simply grows up, almost unconsciously, and allows us to be 
addressed through it by the event [Ereignis]. What happens? Nothing. 
One needn’t manufacture things in a tragic way; the tragedy of life does 
not exist by necessity. But I cannot agree with the notion that we live 
our lives. On the contrary, we are incapable of living our lives, and this 
is our honor, exactly this, that we are not capable of doing so.
Schirmacher: I don’t agree with that.
Lyotard: I am sure you agree.
Schirmacher: I agree about the suffering, and also that the concept 
of balance has to be recast. Balance has as little to do with the new-age 
yin-yang mishmash as it does with well-rounded cheerfulness or a har-
mony between body and mind. Balance is the model [Entwurf ] for a 
struggle whose outcome will always remain uncertain.
Lyotard: But doesn’t one need a yardstick [Maß] for that? Shouldn’t 
you have to be able to count?
Schirmacher: Perhaps one needs proportion, but in Goethe’s sense, 
who says to the moment “Do tarry, you are so beautiful,” and yet fears 
this very tarrying. It is the hope for eternal happiness, the [Nu] of the 
mystic, and therefore a hope that never fulfills itself. The yardstick 
[Maß] is given through absence, life is lived by means of its inability to 
be lived. In this I agree with you indeed, but not with the dualistic un-
dertone that neglects the third standpoint (and the [Geviert]). It is my 
honor to deny myself to the positively lived life, but also to death and 
unnecessary suffering. Consciously I will fail, but behind my back I will 
just as inevitably achieve fulfillment. Such fulfillment entails necessary 
suffering, the rupture and the parting, but protects it within the inat-
tentive and the unfamiliar. Homo generator is not the maker, neither 
the confident nor the timid one, for as Homo faber we would remain 
obligated to our planning, to the system of knowledge. An open hori-
zon, appropriate to generating-as-transpiring [ereignen], proclaims the 
multiplicity of artificial life.
194
P O L I G R A F I
Lyotard: If you remain wary of an ideology oriented toward Epi-
cureus or Goethe, I will allow you that the event [Ereignis] always de-
pends on the individual: an occurrence becomes an event because a feel-
ing perceives it as an event. As long as computers are not permeable to 
[feelings?], they hinder the event for people.
Schirmacher: That is why the computer society we have today is only 
a caricature of the inchoate artificial life, for the very reason that total 
certainty [Sicherheit] is valued over open perception, insensitivity over 
feeling. But this is already being broken open from within: that the en-
tirety of programs are non-rationally controlled, that the interaction of 
the electronic network-world cannot be predicted, are promising signs.
Lyotard: But doesn’t the concept of a life of one’s own remain suspi-
cious? André Malraux, about whom I wrote a biography, maintained a 
very critical position against this concept. My so-called own life consists 
of course only of events into which I have inscribed myself, which I—of-
ten quite literally—ascribed to myself. Whether love, family, profession, 
politics—what in all that is my life, is due to the ability to sign with 
my name and my body (my hand) whatever I have chosen in terms of 
events. He who signs is always right!
Schirmacher: Just like the Soviet Encyclopedia (may it rest in peace), 
which bore a different handwriting after every party congress.
Lyotard: A very good example!
Schirmacher: That is why my ethics for an artificial life has to do 
only superficially with self-realization, ego identity, or social success. 
For no one can really know whether his life will achieve fulfillment, 
and all the less can one make any reliable pronouncements about the 
fulfillment achieved by one’s fellows. One cannot recognize the good 
life by its fruits any more than one can recognize the motives that have 
prompted us to action; neither observance of the laws nor the freedom 
of “live as you want to live” are helpful when it comes to self-evaluation 
[assigning a value to oneself ]. No therapy can teach me how to recog-
nize my event! Homo generator extricates himself from the alternative 
between cosmocentric and anthropocentric, and in the interstitial life 
of feelings escapes the ideological struggle between survival and death. 
Feeling, intuition, care, justice, deconstruction are indicators of a life 
behind our backs, the imperceptible perception of which must become 
195
H O M O  G E N E R A T O R  I N  T H E  P O S T M O D E R N  D I S C U S S I O N
more perceptible for the further development of artificial life. It is there-
fore not enough for Homo generator to become conscious of his ab-
solute responsibility for the created worlds, if he wants to be able to 
answer them ethically. Homo generator does not have to wait for the 
post-technological age to generate his answer, but rather this answer 
has kept us alive (in an artificial life), without it having been necessary 
to approach it with mere cryptic allusions. Doesn’t it seem as though it 
were time to look for Plato’s daimon, Leibnitz’s monad, Hegel’s abso-
lute idea, Kierkegaard’s seducer, Nietzsche’s superman, Adorno’s natural 
beauty [Naturschöne] and Heidegger’s event [Ereignis] in their worlds? 
For these are figures—as tottering and unsteady as they might be—of a 
life fulfilling itself, and their worlds are therefore in and of themselves 
worlds of ethics. We know practically nothing about these worlds of 
ethics (or only—as Schopenhauer specified—in the form of Nothing); 
yet Homo generator generates these worlds continually and lives in all 
of them, [wie von selbst], always already. One actually ought to remain 
silent about all of this, for word-language does not allow us to say what 
has to be said.
Lyotard: Yes, because all words express a certain ideology.
Schirmacher: I am quite painfully conscious of that, and even poetic 
language can only occasionally flee what Heidegger termed the age of 
ideology. Nevertheless, there is no need to resort to apocalyptic visions 
here: a fundamental phenomenology of the post-technological world 
gives cause to speculate that Heidegger’s [turnaround; Kehre] for future 
generations is in many ways already (generated) reality. Metaphysics has 
come to its conclusion in modern technology and has at the same time 
made itself obsolete: images and concepts are entwined with the media 
and tell without inhibition about everyday and imagined praxis, but no 
longer put themselves in the place of a life that achieves fulfillment. Get 
a life before you get a theory! No theory will be able to or will want to 
try to catch up to the fact that Homo generator lives in the worlds of 
ethics, since philosophy of course—as Hegel already recognized—is on 
principle an after-the-fact thought, when the forms of life have become 
old. But reflection [Nach-Denken] too has its genuine world; its honor 
is open deliberation, and its strength lies in its subversive resistance to 
ideologies, which otherwise inevitably develop into prescriptions.
196
P O L I G R A F I
Lyotard: I value your philosophical work that has led to Homo gen-
erator—for the critical debate of the postmodern in the context of our 
times it appears to me to be of decisive significance.
* Wolfgang Schirmacher is a Continental philosopher, Professor of Philosophy and founder of 
the pioneering Media and Communications Division at the European Graduate School (EGS), 
Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Prof. Dr. Schirmacher is also the Martin Heidegger Chair at EGS.
N o t e
1 This article appeared previously in a slightly different form. See Schirmacher, W. (2005), 
“Homo Generator in the Postmodern Discussion: From a Conversation with Jean-François 
Lyotard.” In: Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts & Communication 7: 86–99. ISSN 1492–4986/2005.